Bridgital Nation Read online

  In other words, as India grows into the third-largest economy over the next decade, housing one-fourth of the global middle class, a significant share of its population will still be at the bottom of the pyramid. 15 The rift between the India of numbers and senses, between averages and lived experience, will still be far from bridged.

  What holds India back from reaching its full potential? The issues have a name. We call them ‘India’s Twin Challenges’: Jobs and Access.

  JOBS

  India has a massive jobs challenge on its hands. Ninety million people will come of working age between 2020 and 2030—a continent’s worth of eager, ambitious, energetic young jobseekers. The promise of these numbers is breathtaking, especially when they are set against other large economies. In the same period, the number of Indians reaching working age will be four times that of the US, Brazil and Indonesia combined.

  When they arrive, they will find an economy that is growing, but is low on gainful work opportunities. Given the lack of reliable data, estimates about the number of jobs created in recent years range from as many as 15 million jobs added in a year, to millions of jobs actually being lost. These estimates provide glimpses into parts of the economy, but never the whole picture.

  The entrants who eventually find work—overall, the unemployment rate is 6 per cent 16—will by and large feel disappointed by the story they have been sold. Most of them will join the informal sector, where there is no shortage of work, but where low productivity, low wages, and the absence of job security and safety are rife. 17 Informal sector jobs often fail to meet even the lowest bar of a good job.

  Good Jobs, According to the Good Jobs Institute at MIT 18

  India’s particular challenge is that a very large number of working-age adults—many of whom are not even in the labour force at this time—need to find productive jobs that they can perform at their existing levels of skill and education. About 66 per cent of the workforce have, at best, the equivalent of an eighth-grade education. Only around one in fifty workers have any kind of formal vocational training. 19 Making matters more acute, sectors of the economy that provide productive jobs—like manufacturing and services—use educated and skilled workers to a greater degree than would be expected.

  The result is a visible split in the nature of the Indian economy—a high-skill, high-productivity sector that produces goods and services for wealthy, tech-savvy, and urban consumers alongside external markets, and a low-cost, low-productivity sector that is mostly geared towards the poor. India is missing a ‘middle’—the midway jobs, the mid-skilled workers.

  Put simply, India is at the leading edge of the question of what happens when a sizeable portion of humanity struggles to find gainful employment.

  ACCESS

  Jobs are only one half of the problem. The other is a critical shortage in access to vital services. We may not know it by name, but we are living witnesses to the access challenge—the village healer offering miraculous treatments on a bicycle; the tired driver who drove his truck into a highway ditch; the overcrowded classrooms and doctors’ waiting rooms with no place to sit; the legal case that goes on for decades; the countless middlemen and agencies that help make sense of it all.

  The access challenge puts services such as quality health and education out of reach for millions of Indians 20—a situation that has arisen in large part because there aren’t enough qualified people.

  For example, it will take a further 600,000 doctors and 2.5 million nurses, a million teachers, about 400,000 agricultural extension workers, and 1.7 million commercial vehicle drivers to meet India’s current needs. 21 Despite the 30 million cases pending within India’s judicial system, the country has only three quarters of the judges it needs. 22 There aren’t enough researchers, plumbers or welders either. The list is a long one because the shortages are endemic. With each passing year, the shortfall is felt a little more, because more people are jostling for the same limited resources.

  The access challenge has other costs. People travel extraordinarily long distances to seek basic services, often at high cost to themselves. This leads to overcrowding in classes, clinics, courtrooms, and everywhere else. Inevitably, quality declines, because specialists are unable to meet the demand for their knowledge and services, and can’t spend enough time on their patients, students, cases or customers.

  Addressing this challenge will bear fruit almost immediately. It will mean shorter wait times. It will mean faster justice. It will mean better quality healthcare and education. It will make people feel less like a crowd, more like they matter. It will improve the quality of life.

  India has an overwhelming demand for vital services, and an overwhelming supply of human capital. It just doesn’t know how to build a bridge between them.

  This is likely because India has never asked itself how they could converge. Instead, the question about jobs has focused on how jobs can be created. Thinking about employment this way has led India down the well-worn path of turning to existing industries that drive economic growth, and adjusting regulations, like fine-tuning a radio. In one year, India encourages the garment and textile manufacturing industry. In another, it gives the film industry a ‘single window clearance’. 23

  Yet these are, at best, partial answers. India struggles because the sectors of its economy that are growing the fastest are not employment intensive. What’s needed is a bridge that allows industries and people to step up and move closer to the formal, more productive end of the economy. This can be done by improving the quality of jobs and helping workers achieve higher skill levels, while simultaneously creating an environment in which firms of all sizes can drive formal job growth.

  In other words, India can no longer tinker at the margins of the twin challenges. What’s required is a complete reimagining of how its parts work.

  Bridgital Nation

  This is where technology, in context, enters the picture. Bridgital holds the key to pulling India out of this conundrum. It works with the novel understanding that the two challenges go hand in hand. By turning a challenge into an opportunity—seeing India’s access challenge as an engine of employment generation—it builds a technology-based bridge between the dual parts of the Indian economy. It helps build the ‘middle’ that India sorely needs.

  The Bridgital approach is a simple one. Technology is there to amplify India’s existing resources and extend them to many more Indians. Bridgital does this by reimagining how services can be delivered and how people can use their talents differently, once they are aided by technology. By using AI, machine learning, IoT and the cloud in a deliberate way, it can help people access services while, at the same time, providing gainful work. But technology alone isn’t the answer; it has to be configured and adapted to the demands of the situation. Bridgital works best when roles and services are deconstructed and reimagined, and when the delivery of the tasks they contain is redesigned.

  In the Bridgital world, technology does not disrupt an existing market as much as it creates an entirely new one. With that comes a fundamental layer of jobs—both direct and indirect—that support the successful delivery of services like healthcare and education. When services are reimagined through twenty-first-century technological advances, an additional layer of workers emerge who can intermediate both technology and existing resources for larger numbers of people.

  Workers augmented by technology take on tasks previously done only by experts and specialists. There is also demand for people who can act as tech-enabled intermediaries between those who need services and those who supply them—demand that, today, is often serviced by the informal sector. Workers in these roles are up-skilled, up-qualified and made comfortable with technology designed to aid their work. This frees up time for specialized workers to focus on the most vital tasks they could be performing, such as serving more people. The result is a more inclusive, productive and formalized system.

  This can be a gift that keeps on giving. Freedom from disease and despai
r, lower transaction costs, access to better education, a better quality of life, will all unleash the creative and productive potential of India’s people and improve the employability of workers over the long run. The more access India creates, the more jobs it will make available to its people, setting off a virtuous cycle of inclusion and growth. Bridgital thinking uses technology as an enabler, a tool, to make the most of what India has, and give the country what it most needs.

  This is the kind of thinking India needs more of: Innovation that addresses the country’s persistent resource deficits in ways unimaginable in the past; and that enhances its workers, rather than replaces them. Throughout this book, we show how this can play out in health, education, agriculture, financial services and logistics. If this strategy is realized, the digital transformation India will undergo can take a form unlike in any other country. Done well, it could positively impact 30 million jobs by 2025 and lead to a 10-20 per cent increase in wages for workers, while giving over 200 million citizens access to better services including health and education. 24

  The future will be one of humans and technology working together. It’s this future India will have to anticipate and design for, keeping its young workforce, limited infrastructure, and linguistic and cultural differences in mind.

  In tackling the twin challenges at the scale India requires, two other strategies stand out. These two strategies address jobs and access, while complementing the Bridgital approach.

  1) The XX Factor: Bringing women to the workforce.

  Under a quarter of women in India engage in paid work. This measure is low in comparison to other countries at similar income levels, and surprisingly, it has fallen in the past decade. Nearly 120 million Indian women—more than double the entire population of South Korea—have at least a secondary education, but do not participate in the workforce.

  The XX Factor 25 addresses the jobs challenge by allowing more of India’s secondary-educated population to transition into the jobs market. For a country that urgently needs skilled workers, their absence is deeply felt in the labour force. If even half of this group of women entered the workforce, in one stroke, the share of workers with at least a secondary education would jump from 33 per cent to 46 per cent—the equivalent of fifteen years’ worth of improvement. This alone could add ₹31 trillion ($440 billion) to India’s GDP. 26

  Women will form an important part of the pool of Bridgital workers. What will it take to bring them to work? Smart policies focused on childcare provision and parental leave, and promoting attitudinal shifts in society around working women are good places to begin. The last decade of experience and research has brought this opportunity to light. India now needs to shift gears and understand better how to make paid work available to and worthwhile for women. With a more balanced educational profile, the country can address a key part of the skills gap it faces. For this to take place, the access barriers to women’s employment need a serious overhaul.

  2) Entrepreneurs everywhere: Preparing the ground for thriving entrepreneurship throughout the country.

  When it comes to jobs, the country has to think hard about both the nature and size of its firms. The Indian business landscape is characterized by a large number of micro businesses, many of which are simply self-employed individuals who are optimistically called ‘entrepreneurs’. They aren’t. What they run are survival ventures, the only road available, the last throw of the dice. If they had a choice, many of these ‘entrepreneurs’ would probably opt for staid, unglamorous salaried jobs.

  In most economies, the engines of job growth are small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which tend to employ between ten and 250 workers each. These businesses provide services locally—think of local hotels, restaurants, health clinics, salons and so on. Across developing countries, SMEs account for over a third of private sector employment; in India, the figure stands at just above a tenth. 27

  A new focus on entrepreneurship throughout the country—bringing India to developing-country averages—could potentially shift 45 million workers into more productive employment in small and medium enterprises. 28 These jobs are more formal, and pay better wages than the opportunities on offer for most job seekers today. Everywhere entrepreneurship can flourish through the development of Bridgital clusters that integrate and extend a range of digital business services, which many SMEs lack access to. Bridgital clusters, coupled with the deeper use of digital governance to transform the relationship between SMEs and the bureaucracy, can positively channel the entrepreneurial spirit inherent throughout the nation.

  These strategies are deeply interwoven. Bridgital provides the unprecedented ‘bridge’ between jobs and access, while XX Factor and Everywhere Entrepreneurship bolster both sides of the scale—multiplying the impact on jobs and access. India needs to solve the twin challenges for hundreds of millions, but the beauty of a technology-driven approach is that scale can take hold.

  Bridgital will provide new opportunities to meet the needs of small and medium businesses. The deconstruction and reimagining of how services are delivered will create new markets and provide new business opportunities for them. One of the biggest hurdles that many small and medium businesses face is in finding skilled workers. And even if they find skilled workers, because there are so few of them, they cannot afford them. Bridgital expands the pool of skilled workers through the aid of technology. Bridgital clusters can also extend tools and technologies that make it easier to find these workers. Similarly, given the high levels of informality in India’s economy, a combination of the Bridgital transformation of industries and thriving everywhere entrepreneurship can provide a meaningful route to paid work for women.

  A common train of thought connects these strategies—an attempt to pull together what India’s unique development journey has, so far, pushed apart.

  There’s a word in Sanskrit—antarlaapika. It means a puzzle or a riddle in which the answer is hidden within the riddle itself. India is an antarlaapika that can be solved with three strategies from within. Each of the three strategies we identified involves interrogating a host of deep-rooted beliefs. These are decidedly not quick fixes. However, they need to be seen as part of the solution to the country’s twin challenges, not simply as issues in isolation. We don’t have to look at digital approaches as simply cost-cutting, profit-enhancing exercises. They can augment our human capital, if we choose wisely. We don’t have to look at gender as solely an inclusion issue. It is firmly a talent decision. We don’t have to look at entrepreneurship with the singular lens of creating billion-dollar unicorns. It is a strength that we can leverage throughout the country. These are all critical bridges to a better future of work for India.

  Envisioning a different future is easy; it is vastly more challenging to bring these visions into the real world, while correcting the errors of the past and reassessing our approach to doing things going forward. To build a new kind of country and take it into the future, it is often assumed, requires a large budget and new plans that capture the popular imagination. But the problem with such an approach is its focus on newness, not outcomes, as the guiding principle. This kind of thinking leads to new technologies being heralded as saviours. It sends us on hospital- and school-building sprees, while neglecting what has already been made at great cost.

  In truth, we already have what it takes to create more and better jobs. We also have the capability to improve and make better use of the existing skill levels of our people, especially once we tailor digital approaches and technologies to our needs. What if doctors, perennially in short supply, were able to treat more patients once their administrative duties were reduced? What if reassigning those duties created new jobs and a new class of worker? What if that class of worker was aided by technology? What if we stopped thinking of humans and technology as competing for the same work?

  This book is a portrait of a most reluctant subject and its citizens. A part of it describes how the challenges of jobs and access keep millions of Indians f
rom offering their best. But it also shows how three clearly defined strategies can hit at the root of the problems that hold India back. We look to rich examples of success, within India and across other countries, that can be replicated or at least, hold universal lessons.

  We draw on our experience working in the Tata Group, as well as the Group’s 150-year history and work across India. 29 This puts us in a unique position to witness the unprecedented and layered set of challenges India faces. We see ourselves sitting amongst these issues: Struggling with gender representation, with making workspaces safer, becoming digitally agile. This book is a part of our own ongoing attempts to learn and figure out next steps.

  But this book is more than that alone. It’s about the gaps that turn ordinary things into extraordinary tasks, and about the people forced to be extraordinary to bridge those gaps. Within it, you will find remarkable human stories that celebrate the resilience, grit, and ingenuity of Indians going about their lives despite the obstacles they face every day. With this work, our aim is to go beyond averages and sweeping statistics and help foster a deeper understanding of India and the needs of Indians by telling you about their lives. It is our attempt at bridging the India of the numbers with the India of the senses.